Antonini Enterprises keeps goods moving

STOCKTON - When school was out, Joe Antonini spent summers working in the Yuba City branch of the family trucking business.

Zachary K. Johnson

STOCKTON - When school was out, Joe Antonini spent summers working in the Yuba City branch of the family trucking business.

He'd run paperwork out from the office to truckers on the night shift waiting to haul tomatoes to a cannery. He ran errands, learned about the equipment by working with mechanics in the trucking company's shop and then moved to the office to learn about dispatch.

"It was all new to me and very exciting, because it had our name on it and had been around for such a long time," he said. "It was something that I wanted to carry on to the next generation."

Antonini is now president and co-owner of the company his grandfather started in Stockton in 1926. Today, Antonini Enterprises LLC has grown and its trucks can be found across the state, from Yreka to San Diego, Antonini said. And it plans to continue to grow in the years to come.

Antonini Enterprises is actually two trucking companies, one providing general freight and the other hauling agricultural commodities from the fields to locations where the food is processed.

Trucking is an integral part of local agricultural industry, Antonini said. "The grower is the starting point, with the crops growing in the field. The processor is the end point, and the trucker is in the middle." And that middle part needs to move fast, especially when dealing with time-sensitive products like peaches and tomatoes, he said.

The company has been tied closely to agriculture from the very beginning. Company founder Virgilio "Vic" Antonini emigrated from Italy before coming to Stockton and buying a farm. Then he started Antonini Fruit Express in 1926.

He passed on the business to his sons, Louis, Jack and Rudy. Joe Antonini and his sister Karen Wuellner are Rudy's children and the co-owners of the enterprise. The company has a long history of moving peaches and tomatoes for canning, and today the company hauls about 10 percent of the state's tomato crop, Antonini said.

The company's backbone is still shipping tied to the canning industry, but it has continued to grow and diversify over the decades.

Antonini Enterprises has five terminals in the state and has plans to move next month from its Stockton location to one in Lathrop. The space is near important rail hubs and is about twice the size of the Stockton location with a better loading area and state-of-the-art fueling and washing facilities. And for the company's import-export business, the move puts the terminal closer to the Port of Oakland than the east Stockton site.

Among the goods Antonini trucks help get in and out of the country is wine. It used to be that wine was shipped from country to country in cases. Antonini trucks haul shipping containers holding huge plastic bags capable of holding about 6,500 gallons of wine.

"Today, it's almost a bulletproof way to ship bulk liquids," he said.

There are other changes in the trucking industry, especially the regulations it must follow, Antonini said. California's clean air rules means companies have to retrofit old vehicles or buy cleaner rigs to meet future targets set by state air pollution regulators.

Antonini Enterprises began moving toward a cleaner fleet relatively early, and now most of its trucks are in compliance.

"We are ahead of the curve," Antonini said. "Our investment going forward will be minimal, because we started investing in compliant trucks in 2008."

In other technology, Antonini said the company plans to upgrade the software after it gets into the new Lathrop location. And the growth will continue from there, he said.

"We have goals to grow in the next five years at a pretty moderate pace ... and still provide premier service," he said.